The past few years have seen an explosion in major economies and businesses seeking to cancel out their polluting activities by paying for emissions to be reduced elsewhere – a practice known as “carbon-offsetting”.

The surging demand for carbon offsets has given rise to a largely unregulated industry where businesses and countries can pay brokers to cut emissions somewhere else in the world.

This is often achieved through forest-protection schemes – which are meant to reduce emissions by preventing deforestation – as well as other methods, such as tree-planting and distributing low-carbon cookstoves in the developing world.

Investigations into individual carbon-offset projects by journalists and non-governmental organisations have revealed that many of these schemes can come with devastating impacts for Indigenous peoples and local communities. Reporting has also found that many schemes overstate their ability to reduce emissions.

By trawling through original media reports published over the past five years and scanning the world’s most comprehensive environmental conflicts database, Carbon Brief draws these stories together for the first time to create a detailed picture of the breadth and scale of the impacts of carbon-offset projects around the world.

Some 70% of the reports examined by Carbon Brief found evidence of carbon-offset projects causing harm to Indigenous people and local communities.

Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed from their land because of carbon-offsetting in the Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the Brazilian, Colombian and Peruvian Amazon, Kenya, Malaysia and Indonesia, according to reports analysed by Carbon Brief.

Cases include one where Indigenous peoples were allegedly threatened with guns and another where publication accused a carbon-offset developer planted on top of the graves of Indigenous peoples.

Nearly half of the reports examined by Carbon Brief found evidence of carbon-offset projects overstating their ability to reduce emissions.

This includes accusations of fossil-fuel companies knowingly using tactics to inflate the offsetting potential of their projects and one alleged case of a California carbon-offset company selling to polluters even after the trees in its forest protection scheme had been burnt down by a wildfire.

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